The present invention relates generally to semiconductor wafers and their fabrication and, more particularly, to semiconductor wafers and their manufacture involving techniques for repairing damaged silicon oxide.
The semiconductor industry has recently experienced technological advances that have permitted dramatic increases in circuit density and complexity, and equally dramatic decreases in power consumption and package sizes. Present semiconductor technology now permits single-chip microprocessors with many millions of transistors, operating at speeds of hundreds of millions of instructions per second to be packaged in relatively small, air-cooled semiconductor device packages. Such technological advances are coupled with heightened complexity of the manufacturing process and increasingly higher standards of reliability, performance, and consistency of semiconductor wafers.
As the manufacturing processes for semiconductor wafers become more complex, and as product standards for such wafers increase, methods for manufacturing and repairing these wafers become increasingly important. Not only is it important to ensure that individual chips are functional, it is also important to ensure that batches of chips perform consistently and meet performance standards. In addition, as technology advances, the cost of manufacturing the high tech wafers increases. The increased cost of wafers results in greater losses when the wafers are defective and must be thrown out.
A particular problem typically found in the manufacture of semiconductor devices and wafers is the damaging of low-density films during processing, such as during etch, photoresist removal, and ashing processes. Low-density films susceptible to such damage include, for example, materials having a low dielectric constant such as those based on an Sixe2x80x94O backbone and having other substituents of composition SiOxRyHz, where 1 less than =x less than =2, R is an organic group such as a methyl or ethyl, 0 less than =y less than =2, and 0 less than =z less than =2. During these processes, bonds in the low-density material can be broken, chemical species are sometimes selectively removed, and the material can become susceptible to further damage during additional processing. These and other problems result in semiconductor wafers and devices having performance, reliability, and other problems.
The present invention is directed to the repair of a semiconductor wafer during its manufacture, and is exemplified in a number of implementations and applications, some of which are summarized below.
According to an example embodiment of the present invention, a semiconductor having damaged low-density film based on an Sixe2x80x94O backbone is repaired in a manner that addresses the problems described in the Background of the Invention hereinabove. An SiO2 deposition precursor, such as silane, and an oxidizer, such as O2 or N2 O, are introduced to a damaged portion of a film having a silicon oxide backbone in the wafer. The deposition precursor reacts with the damaged film, and a thin silicon dioxide layer is grown within the damaged film. The thin silicon dioxide leads to the repair of wafer damage in manners including inducing the passivation of the reactive species or the densification of the interfacial area.
The above summary of the present invention is not intended to describe each illustrated embodiment or every implementation of the present invention. The figures and detailed description which follow more particularly exemplify these embodiments.